An efficient real-time multicast protocol RFRM

Efficient and reliable real-time multicast protocols are highly desirable to facilitate the development of fault tolerant distributed real-time applications. The purpose of this paper is to develop a release-time based fault-tolerant real-time multicast protocol (RFRM). RFRM is based on the idea of attaching the official release time to each multicast message and employs optimistic message delivery in order to provide a simple consistency property. RFRM allows each member to deliver regular messages or optimistic messages to applications according to the commit message from the sender. By delivering optimistic multicast messages, which are not committed until the official release time, RFRM will reduce the amount of control messages in real-time multicast applications.